Phil Ochs: I Ain’t Marching Anymore

Though the cover shot of I Ain’t Marching Anymore is a graveyard of grim political rhetoric—Phil Ochs slumped against a wall of torn Barry Goldwater and Kenneth Keating posters, their slogans shredded and inscrutable—the back cover essays comprise a beatnik rhapsody for the ages. Written by Ochs and the critic Bruce Jackson, they deliver the sort of earnest, overly verbose salvo only a Greenwich Village protest-folk record could deliver: a dense scrum of cheers to the Movement, jeers at the invertebrates in Congress, and navel-gazings on the quest for truth in art, with a track listing and credits seemingly wedged in as afterthought.